Let us call the roll of some of the specific improvements in the lot of the working men and women that have come about during the past eight years.

More than forty-two million American employees are now members of the old-age pension system. An additional two million men and women, over sixty-five years of age, are now receiving cash grants each month.

Twenty-nine million American employees have been brought under the protection of unemployment insurance.

Collective bargaining has been guaranteed.

A minimum wage has been established.

A maximum work week of forty hours has been fixed, with provision for time-and-a-half for overtime.

Child labor has been outlawed.

The average hourly earnings of factory workers were fifty-six cents in the boom year of 1929. By February, 1933—before I went to Washington—they had dropped to forty-five cents an hour. They are now sixty-seven cents an hour—not only higher than in 1933, but, mark you, nearly eleven cents an hour higher than in 1929 itself.

Factory pay envelopes—most of you get them—had fallen to five billion dollars a year by 1932. By 1940, factory payrolls are running at the rate of ten billion dollars.

And, something else, we must not forget that the cost of living today is twenty-two per cent lower than it was in 1929. That means something to the average American family